Female circumcision is a horrifying procedure that can be defined as the removal of the clitoris on the body of a female. The surgery is often accompanied by ceremonies intended to honor and welcome the girls into their communities. It can be observed in parts of Northern Africa and Southern Arabia where many girls undergo ritual surgery involving removal of parts of their external genitalia. About eighty million living women have had this surgery, and an additional four or five million girls un...

Geisha's of the New World Introduction Many different cultures and countries have created niches in American society that sustain and envelop traditions from their native lands. Within these miniature sub-countries, some traditional practices defy the typical American beliefs. Of these, the Japanese cultural practice of the Geisha, has been brought to the societal forefront by the recently published novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. The artisan practice of being a Geisha is a long-lived tradition in J...

As you are reading this article, there are between eight and ten million women and girls in the Middle East and in Africa who are at risk of undergoing one form or another of genital cutting. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), also known as female circumcision, or female genital cutting, has been practiced for several thousand years in almost 30 African and Middle Eastern nations. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates between 100 and 132 million women and girls worldwide have been subjecte...

To view one's own culture as the universal by which all others are judged would be ultimately subjective, as our perceptions of cultural differences are shaped largely by our immersion in our own culture. An ethnocentric approach stems from judging an alternate culture in relation to one's own pre-conceived cultural values, held to be superior; the parallax phenomenon, the inability to escape our own biases, prevents objective analysis of different cultures. A cultural relativist maintains the p...

Warrior Marks Female circumcision is a traditional ritual that is mostly practiced in Africa on young girls with ages that vary from birth to pre-pubescent. It is reported to have its origins (with varying degrees of reliability) in ancient Egypt. Female circumcision was also discovered being practiced in western India and eastern Asia until it was outlawed around the turn of the 20th century (common era). The procedure is varied through three different types of circumcision: Infibulation, clito...

There are so many bad things in the world but according to many, cannibalism is considered just about the worst. Depending on your point of view, it rises above even such criminal abominations as, rape and genocide. Then again, we live in a culture, in which people would run vomiting to the bathroom if they saw what went into making their McDonald's hamburgers. Cannibalism, also known as anthropophagi, is defined as the act or practice of eating members of the same species. The word anthropophag...

Description: Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley The Harappa civilization flourished in the Indus Valley during India+s Bronze Age of Body of Essay: Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley The Harappa civilization flourished in the Indus Valley during India+s Bronze Age of the third millennium b. c. This thriving culture was all but completely decimated in 2500 b. c. by invading Aryan groups from the west. The archaeological evidence that has been produced by the famous sites of Harappa and Mohenjo-...

The year was 1943. Hundreds of Jewish people were being marched into the gas chambers in accordance with Adolf Hitler's orders. In the two years that followed, millions of Jews were killed and only a fraction survived the painful ordeals at the Nazi German prison camps. However, all of the chaos ended as World War II came to a close: the American and British soldiers had won and Hitler's Third Reich was no more. A certain ethical position would state that the anti-sematic Nazi German culture was...

Female Genital Mutilation: Barbaric Custom or Cultural Rite"I was shaking out of my skin with fear. I sat at Netsent's head so she couldn't cry out. The circumcise r began to cut with a razor blade. She cut everything: the clitoris, the inner and outer labia. There was so much blood!" This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in Marie Claire in April 2003. The speaker is a girl by the name of Genet Girma, an Ethiopian, describing the conditions under which her sister Netsent was forced to...

To truly understand the meaning of shamanism one must uncover the original definition. The word shaman comes from the language of the Even, a small Tungus-speaking group of hunters and reindeer herders from Siberia. It was first used only to designate a religious specialist from this region. By the beginning of the 20th century it was already being applied to a variety of North America and South American practices from the present and the past. Today people have gone as far as defining the word ...

Ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman practices of preparing the dead for the next cradle of humanity are very intriguing. These two cultures differ in a multitude of ways yet similarities can be noted in the domain of funerary services. In the realm of Egyptian afterlife, The Book of the Dead can provide one with vital information concerning ritual entombment practices and myths of the afterlife. The additional handouts I received from Timothy Stoker also proved to be useful in trying uncover vital ...

Juliana Chang While jazz and blues rhythms and aesthetics have been used by a number of Asian American poets, Inada's poetry stands out in its consistency and depth of engagement with jazz. Inada himself cites jazz as the strongest influence on his writing. His collection Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) begins with a whimsical portrait of a Japanese American figure playing "air bass"; it includes tributes to jazz musicians and singers such as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Billi...

New and Improved? : The processes of globalization on spiritual practices; illustrated by the global spread of Reiki. The processes of globalization create an open market place for trade, but globalization is also an exchange of cultures, of ideas and practices. Spiritual practices and rituals are one of the ways in which a culture reproduces itself and as such, is subject to hegemonic forces which act to alter the existing form. It has been said that Globalisation may be regarded as a threat to...

Death is one of the most terrible things we humans have to go through. Where do we go after death? Is there a Hell or a Heaven? These are questions that still remain without answers. Since remote times, men have wondered about this, but not even technology as helped us find answers. Some popple are said to have answers; it is true they do have answers, but answers tart are mainly fixed on their religious beliefs. Almost all religions have a theory about death, but the vary from one another, and ...

In Donaldson's Values in Tension: Ethics Away From Home, he describes a policy that was standard at home, but unsuccessful elsewhere. In one example, the manager of a U.S. company in China caught one of the employees stealing. By following the company's practice and turning the employee over to the authorities, which was the right thing to do according to our values. The employee was executed because he was judged based on China's political, legal, and ethical codes, while to us (Americans) the ...

A Critique Of Cultural Relativism Essay, Research Critique Of Cultural Relativism A critique of cultural relativism In his article "Cultural relativism and cultural values', Melville Herskovits defines the principle of cultural relativism as "judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation' (26). This is the basic premise of cultural relativism, that beliefs, values, and morals are all based on one's culture. Therefore, since...